Hotel Les Mamelles Dakar

... I know her family and Kareem's family, and the pictures in the house are all familiar to me. Plus, they are exceptionally generous and hospitable, and I trust them completely.

My first day in Dakar, I didn't leave their apartment. It's true that I didn't have any orientation or knowledge of how to go anywhere, but I was also seized by a fear of doing anything on my own in this place that is so, so different from anywhere I've been before. Having ...

... though, as I would often try to talk to the cab drivers in Hassaniya, until their faces reminded me to break out my broken French....   My last day in Dakar, a few of us took a boat to Goree Island, which served as a base for the West African slave trade starting in the late 1400s.  We found a local guide who took us around and relayed some pretty interesting, however tragic, info about the island's history.    It was ...

... and scary to see how hateful and immoral people are that are involved in the huge drug cartels can be. The head of the Columbian cartel in Miami for many years was a woman named Griselda Blanco. She was a stone cold killer that sent out a hit for over 200 people. However due to complications with the trial and witnesses that arose from a phone sex scandal between her star witness (one of Griselda's hitmen) and the District Attorney, Griselda was offered a ...

... coworker to fix the safe in my room. And then AGAIN to add a deadbolt to the sliding door of my balcony. Were they just adding extra security? I hope so. But it made me wanna call the other passengers and ask if they had the same thing, and I was also tempted to ask one of the passengers if I could sleep in their room because of the 'work' being done in my room. I wanted to switch rooms but I already had a hard time asking ...

... de la conjoncture économique actuel, ça craint tellement que désormais même Sarko parle de l'importance de 'intervention de l'Etat, alors que tous ces droitistes ne cessait pas ses séances de évangélisation pour le libéralisme. Gare à vous les enfants, on va tous se casser la figure, tournez vous vers l'agriculture de subsistance. Cidade bwé europeia em miniatura e com um pouco menos de manutenção, ainda que muito digna na sua indigência. A cidade é enorme e o ...

... sister gets back sometime after midnight, I still can't really get out of bed, am having some difficulty breathing, and my blood pressure is so low that my hands and arms keep going numb. My sister is of course a little freaked out by my condition (apparently I looked like "death") and starts trying to figure out what horrible diease I have. In the mean time I'm telling her not to worry because I don't have a fever and ...

... The area, being on a river, is very prone to flooding and so he showed us their system to try and prevent that from occurring. The neighborhood around the school was definitely third world. Lots of poverty, trash eating goats, and tiny little man-made shacks full of strange trinkets and produce. After our tour, we joined the kids in song and traditional Senegalese dance. It was CRAZY!!! The drums and the dancing were very up beat and every one was having a blast. Even ...

... on Ile de Goree - just off the coast of Dakar. It's a public holiday here so not sure if the city will be empty - so we'll just have to wait and see... Updated Sat afternoon. Ile de Goree was busy with everyone enjoying the holiday but the city was very quiet. There were bands and groups marching on the Island in celebration of Independance, and all the women traders in matching outfits especially for the occasion. We set off from Dakar late afternoon and took ...

... and milk. Then ten days later my village doubled in size as relatives from all over Senegal and abroad gathered to eat, dress up and stay up all night listening to the life of Mohammad. Gamou is different for every village. It is not uniformly celebrated though out the county at the same time but rather celebrated at different times and then relatives can go to as many Gamous as they want. It was kind of funny that I got stuck tattooing a ...

... almost sixty hours had passed, or would have, anyway, if it had actually rolled into the station. It didn't. The train dropped us off at the edge of town at five in the morning, we final travelers looking and feeling like compost after being squeezed together for the better part of three nights. What to do now? Bite the bullet. Find a hotel and hope it's late enough that I'll only be charged for one day if I leave the next ...